What will happen if all miners stop mining?

Ryushin

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Quote from: kakonhat on April 09, 2020, 11:09:20 PM

We know a few days ago there are completed halving of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. After halving of Bitcoin Cash there was no block created almost two hours. On the other hand, Bitcoin SV lost value after the halving.
I am very curious. What will happen for Bitcoin if all the miners stop their mining?
Will it have value?
will it possible to transfer?

The answer is new mining rigs will start entering the market after the halving, miners only need to upgrade and things will be back to normal, only old miners will go obsolete, china companies have already start reproduction of new mining machines

stompix

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Quote from: bitmover on April 11, 2020, 07:46:53 AM

Quote from: stompix on April 10, 2020, 01:14:24 PM

~

I don't think what you described can happen.
Even if hash rate suddenly drop very hard blocks would still be confirmed at a very slow rate (let's say 1 per hour , as more people with GPU would start mining.

It's an extreme scenario if the perfect storm happens this will be the result.
If another crash happens, if suddenly Trump comes up saying it will ban bitcoin usage, if China prosecutes Chinese miners at the same time, yeah a 90% drop in mining will happen, but! at that point, we will have far bigger problems that a block every hour till the next adjustment.
But as I said, it's a scenario of ...what if! Chances of happening are the same as mining a solo block.

But no, GPU mining to reach the next adjustment...nope Grin

An S19 is doing 50Th, most graphic cards on the market are able to perform only 3-4 Gh/h.
The entire hash rate is around 100Exa, so to reach 10% with GPU you would need around 2-3 billion cards Grin

.

Quote from: Wenbing on April 11, 2020, 08:16:16 AM

But, have thought of viewing this issue from this angle? Every miner is in a business and the idea of doing business is to be break even and become profitable.

If the mining fee (bitcoin reward) and the transaction fees used for their payment is no longer in place, how will their businesses survive? Also altering the core philosophies of the network is a breach of trust.

Two things, in the perfect world I see, a lot of the mining would be done at a loss because it helps secure a lot of wealth, so it would make sense for let's say Coinbase to power up 10k Asics at a cost of 50k a day when it has trillions in wealth stored in the chain. Second, for a period of time, we only need the price to be double that of the last halving, of course, it can't go on like this forever but we have at least 8-12 years to think of a solution. And beyond 20 years...I don't really think I would care myself that much about earthly things!

Wenbing

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There is gold in volatility..

Quote from: stompix on April 10, 2020, 01:14:24 PM

Quote from: TryNinja on April 10, 2020, 10:00:09 AM

So if everyone stops right now and the hash power of the network is equal to one guy mining with a CPU, it won't adjust after some time? I wasn't aware of this.
It makes sense if the difficulty only changes after X blocks mined (and with a single CPU, it will take a looong time for that to happen). I was thinking this was more time based rather than block based, but thinking now, that makes more sense.

Yeah, it doesn't adjust over time, it adjusts every 2016 blocks.
So, if this doomsday scenario where not all miners, let's just say 90% of them quit the difficulty will now adjust in the standard 14 days but in 140 days with a block every 100 minutes.

A lot of shitcoins have been attacked like that in the early days, with GPU frames switching to mine them, raising the difficulty 10 times and when that adjusted leaving them to die with no blocks being mined. That's when Kimoto Gravity Well, Digishield appeared.

Will the protocol survive? Yeah! Will the confidence and trust behind the coin....I have doubts, depending on the scale.

Fortunately, the scenario is close to impossible right now, and it's because of the good old $.
Not only is there still a financial incentive to mine, but also if some farms try to drop out of the business there is a lot of formerly inefficient gear that was retired (millions of s9) that will come back online since it is again profitable for them to mine.

Quote from: bitmover on April 10, 2020, 12:52:15 AM

As many already mentioned, if miners stop bitcoin will survive.
It is not that easy to kill bitcoin. It will survive

Actually it will be not dead and also not alive, more like a virus.
If all miners quit there will be no more blocks, no more confirmed transactions, so no activity on the chain but at the same time, even if 100 years pass and suddenly a single miner decides to mine it will come back..alive.

Great contribution.

But, have thought of viewing this issue from this angle? Every miner is in a business and the idea of doing business is to be break even and become profitable.

If the mining fee (bitcoin reward) and the transaction fees used for their payment is no longer in place, how will their businesses survive? Also altering the core philosophies of the network is a breach of trust.

What do you think?

bitmover

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Quote from: stompix on April 10, 2020, 01:14:24 PM

Actually it will be not dead and also not alive, more like a virus.
If all miners quit there will be no more blocks, no more confirmed transactions, so no activity on the chain but at the same time, even if 100 years pass and suddenly a single miner decides to mine it will come back..alive.

I don't think what you described can happen.

Even if hash rate suddenly drop very hard blocks would still be confirmed at a very slow rate (let's say 1 per hour , as more people with GPU would start mining.

Additionally , if one block per hour is a pain in the ass and community cant wait until a difficult adjustment, a fork would solve this.

The network could be forked and the difficult adjusted, or mining could be changed to be more GPU friendly.

figmentofmyass

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Quote from: TryNinja on April 10, 2020, 01:31:05 PM

Not gonna lie, this is actually pretty scary. I've never stopped to think about this possibility since I always had the idea that difficulty decreases anyways even if the hash power is at zero, but that makes sense since BTC only sees blocks and not time itself. Have you seen anything/any discussion about countering this issue anywhere?

there were some fears among core developers that there would be a severe hash rate drop following the 2016 halving. luke dashjr proposed readying an emergency hard fork to the difficulty adjustment algorithm, in case those fears came to pass. the ensuing discussion is worth a read: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-March/012489.html

stompix

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Quote from: Darker45 on April 10, 2020, 10:14:44 PM

Quote from: stompix on April 10, 2020, 01:14:24 PM

~

But with the same difficulty, right? Even after a full century? So he will have to start from step 1 and try to finish mining the entire 2016 blocks before the difficulty is reduced accordingly? But since the hash power is so low it will take forever to finish the whole of the 2016 blocks. So, theoretically, if there is a sudden stop of Bitcoin mining or perhaps exodus of Bitcoin miners for whatever reason and one tries to revive it, is there any point?

There would be no point in reviving it even one year after if it fails, why go through all the trouble one year after people have ditched it, the whole trust it has build till now would be already destroyed. It wouldn't make any sense to revive it from the economical point of view, nothing other than a hobby project, just like we now play along with classical reenactments of Roman legions or Renaissance festivals. If it failed 100 years ago noting would make it viable a century after.

It was just an extreme example that unless you somehow manage to destroy all blockchain copies this bitcoin will never be truly dead, and besides, in 100 years with the expected improvement in science and technology, you might be able to print at home a miner capable of 1exahash alone Roll Eyes

XenoFever

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Miners are the ones who are responsible on processing the transactions of different cryptocurrency so basically if there would be no miners at all the bitcoin andnother cryptocurrency will be dead.

But I don't think that this would happen because we have so much miners in this cryptoworld, our big whales will not let this things happen because some people are considered this as their work. There are so many things that this cryptoworld brings to us.

Wenbing

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There is gold in volatility..

Quote from: mk4 on April 10, 2020, 12:30:48 PM

Quote from: Wenbing on April 10, 2020, 12:16:00 PM

I love your curiosity. Youur question is in the supply side of bitcoin. These are what will happen if bitcoin mining stops today.

1. The supply of bitcoin will be lower than the demand for Bitcoin.
2. The price of bitcoin will dramatically skyrocket due to the scarcity of bitcoin.
3. Being that there is value in scarcity, that means investors will seek to invest into bitcoin.
4. The whitepaper already pegged the supply of bitcoin to be 21million in circulation, even at that the value of bitcoin will still be high.

Not that good of an assumption. If bitcoin mining completely stops, sure there wouldn't be any bitcoin to enter the markets hence more scarcity. But you're completely assuming that people would want to buy something that no one is mining. Who cares about scarcity if you can't even send out the asset? How will they be able to receive or send the bitcoin in the first place if no one is mining? Take note that we're talking about ALL miners stopping; based on OP's title.

Thanks for the observation. When all miners stop mining the bitcoin transaction operations automatically stops because its miners that perform this tasks.

Darker45

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Quote from: stompix on April 10, 2020, 01:14:24 PM

~snip~

Quote from: bitmover on April 10, 2020, 12:52:15 AM

As many already mentioned, if miners stop bitcoin will survive.
It is not that easy to kill bitcoin. It will survive

Actually it will be not dead and also not alive, more like a virus.
If all miners quit there will be no more blocks, no more confirmed transactions, so no activity on the chain but at the same time, even if 100 years pass and suddenly a single miner decides to mine it will come back..alive.

But with the same difficulty, right? Even after a full century? So he will have to start from step 1 and try to finish mining the entire 2016 blocks before the difficulty is reduced accordingly? But since the hash power is so low it will take forever to finish the whole of the 2016 blocks. So, theoretically, if there is a sudden stop of Bitcoin mining or perhaps exodus of Bitcoin miners for whatever reason and one tries to revive it, is there any point?

hatshepsut93

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Quote from: crwth on April 10, 2020, 01:36:11 PM

So, in summary, it's not possible to have no miners. If that happens, as long as one node is alive computing, Bitcoin will stay alive. Anyways, It's not possible because a lot of people are already invested in Bitcoin, especially the miners, and their mining gears are expensive, and it's best not to be put to waste.

Did you read the whole thread carefully? If you imagine only one node left, it would take thousands of years to mine one block on top the last block. This node would have to fork and manually adjust difficulty by changing the protocol if they would want to actually mine blocks every 10 minutes again.

Yes, it sounds too abstract first, but imagine a nuclear war and 99.9% of hashpower instantly going down. Bitcoin would be rendered unusable for years unless there will be a manual fork to adjust the difficulty.

tvplus006

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Quote from: kakonhat on April 09, 2020, 11:09:20 PM

We know a few days ago there are completed halving of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. After halving of Bitcoin Cash there was no block created almost two hours. On the other hand, Bitcoin SV lost value after the halving.
I am very curious. What will happen for Bitcoin if all the miners stop their mining?
Will it have value?
will it possible to transfer?

It is difficult for me to make a correct forecast of what will happen to bitcoin after halving. But I think that in the near future, miners who earned Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV will partially switch to mining BTC. And this will continue until halving bitcoin, because the reward for a block before halving will be higher than Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV.

stompix

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Quote from: TryNinja on April 10, 2020, 01:31:05 PM

Have you seen anything/any discussion about countering this issue anywhere?

Yeah, tens of times..nothing came out, this is 2011:
Difficulty adjustment needs modifying
Here and here

So, the consensus was and still is that

Quote

if we lose 90% of hashing power in a month then there that is a sign something much more serious is wrong with bitcoin than the difficulty algorithm

It makes sense, if 90% of the miners do quit, why would they do that in the first place?
If they would be bribed, they can be bribed to mine empty blocks, to perform an attack, everything else.
If a country or government has the power to bring 90% of the hashrate offline permanently, they could also do a lot more damage than just almost stopping the chain, they would shut down exchanges, throw people in jail, ban possession and usage, which would bring down just as more.

crwth

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So, in summary, it's not possible to have no miners. If that happens, as long as one node is alive computing, Bitcoin will stay alive. Anyways, It's not possible because a lot of people are already invested in Bitcoin, especially the miners, and their mining gears are expensive, and it's best not to be put to waste.

TryNinja

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Quote from: stompix on April 10, 2020, 01:14:24 PM

~

Not gonna lie, this is actually pretty scary. I've never stopped to think about this possibility since I always had the idea that difficulty decreases anyways even if the hash power is at zero, but that makes sense since BTC only sees blocks and not time itself. Have you seen anything/any discussion about countering this issue anywhere?

stompix

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Quote from: TryNinja on April 10, 2020, 10:00:09 AM

So if everyone stops right now and the hash power of the network is equal to one guy mining with a CPU, it won't adjust after some time? I wasn't aware of this.
It makes sense if the difficulty only changes after X blocks mined (and with a single CPU, it will take a looong time for that to happen). I was thinking this was more time based rather than block based, but thinking now, that makes more sense.

Yeah, it doesn't adjust over time, it adjusts every 2016 blocks.
So, if this doomsday scenario where not all miners, let's just say 90% of them quit the difficulty will now adjust in the standard 14 days but in 140 days with a block every 100 minutes.

A lot of shitcoins have been attacked like that in the early days, with GPU frames switching to mine them, raising the difficulty 10 times and when that adjusted leaving them to die with no blocks being mined. That's when Kimoto Gravity Well, Digishield appeared.

Will the protocol survive? Yeah! Will the confidence and trust behind the coin....I have doubts, depending on the scale.

Fortunately, the scenario is close to impossible right now, and it's because of the good old $.
Not only is there still a financial incentive to mine, but also if some farms try to drop out of the business there is a lot of formerly inefficient gear that was retired (millions of s9) that will come back online since it is again profitable for them to mine.

Quote from: bitmover on April 10, 2020, 12:52:15 AM

As many already mentioned, if miners stop bitcoin will survive.
It is not that easy to kill bitcoin. It will survive

Actually it will be not dead and also not alive, more like a virus.
If all miners quit there will be no more blocks, no more confirmed transactions, so no activity on the chain but at the same time, even if 100 years pass and suddenly a single miner decides to mine it will come back..alive.

mk4

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Quote from: Wenbing on April 10, 2020, 12:16:00 PM

I love your curiosity. Youur question is in the supply side of bitcoin. These are what will happen if bitcoin mining stops today.

1. The supply of bitcoin will be lower than the demand for Bitcoin.
2. The price of bitcoin will dramatically skyrocket due to the scarcity of bitcoin.
3. Being that there is value in scarcity, that means investors will seek to invest into bitcoin.
4. The whitepaper already pegged the supply of bitcoin to be 21million in circulation, even at that the value of bitcoin will still be high.

Not that good of an assumption. If bitcoin mining completely stops, sure there wouldn't be any bitcoin to enter the markets hence more scarcity. But you're completely assuming that people would want to buy something that no one is mining. Who cares about scarcity if you can't even send out the asset? How will they be able to receive or send the bitcoin in the first place if no one is mining? Take note that we're talking about ALL miners stopping; based on OP's title.

Wenbing

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There is gold in volatility..

Quote from: kakonhat on April 09, 2020, 11:09:20 PM

We know a few days ago there are completed halving of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. After halving of Bitcoin Cash there was no block created almost two hours. On the other hand, Bitcoin SV lost value after the halving.
I am very curious. What will happen for Bitcoin if all the miners stop their mining?
Will it have value?
will it possible to transfer?

I love your curiosity. Youur question is in the supply side of bitcoin. These are what will happen if bitcoin mining stops today.

1. The supply of bitcoin will be lower than the demand for Bitcoin.
2. The price of bitcoin will dramatically skyrocket due to the scarcity of bitcoin.
3. Being that there is value in scarcity, that means investors will seek to invest into bitcoin.
4. The whitepaper already pegged the supply of bitcoin to be 21million in circulation, even at that the value of bitcoin will still be high.

TryNinja

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Quote from: figmentofmyass on April 10, 2020, 05:45:39 AM

of course it can theoretically happen. if all miners stopped mining, difficulty would not adjust. it doesn't just magically adjust when hash rate drops. the blockchain needs to reach the 2016 block difficulty adjustment threshold.

there are lots of dead blockchains out there where transactions can no longer be processed. let's hope bitcoin never joins them, but the possibility certainly exists.

So if everyone stops right now and the hash power of the network is equal to one guy mining with a CPU, it won't adjust after some time? I wasn't aware of this.

It makes sense if the difficulty only changes after X blocks mined (and with a single CPU, it will take a looong time for that to happen). I was thinking this was more time based rather than block based, but thinking now, that makes more sense.

Akiko

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Quote from: kakonhat on April 09, 2020, 11:09:20 PM

We know a few days ago there are completed halving of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. After halving of Bitcoin Cash there was no block created almost two hours. On the other hand, Bitcoin SV lost value after the halving.
I am very curious. What will happen for Bitcoin if all the miners stop their mining?
Will it have value?
will it possible to transfer?

Qoura already have answer for that questions if miners will stop mining read completw the article to have an idea.
https://www.quora.com/What-if-everyone-stop-mining-Bitcoin .

For me the bitcoin will not have any more value since no one will mine it to confirm the transaction.

KrisAlex18

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If there would not be miners anymore then the bitcoin will be dead because miners are responsible to process the transaction, the bitcoin and other cryptocurrency is a continuous process, it happens because of transferring block from blockchain, transferring of money was also done by the miners so if there is no miners at all bitcoin will be dead, but I think it wont happen because there are so many miners all over the world, they will not let this happen, bitcoin is really a big help for everyone especially with this current situation, where crisis is in our area. We use bitcoin to continue to transactions, just like purchasing goods and buying some bills.

figmentofmyass

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Quote from: TryNinja on April 09, 2020, 11:34:22 PM

Quote from: Darker45 on April 09, 2020, 11:23:53 PM

Miners are there to basically process transactions. If there are no miners, transactions won't be be processed and confirmed. I'm afraid there will be no more transactions on the network without the necessary processing capacity of miners.

This can't happen. If miners leave, the difficulty decreases and becomes easier to mine.

of course it can theoretically happen. if all miners stopped mining, difficulty would not adjust. it doesn't just magically adjust when hash rate drops. the blockchain needs to reach the 2016 block difficulty adjustment threshold.

there are lots of dead blockchains out there where transactions can no longer be processed. let's hope bitcoin never joins them, but the possibility certainly exists.

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Quote from: TryNinja on April 09, 2020, 11:34:22 PM

If miners leave, the difficulty decreases and becomes easier to mine.

Actually if all the miners just go in the same time, the difficulty won't adjust, right?
The difficulty adjustment happens every 2016 blocks. If no miners, the difficulty remains high since no blocks get mined.
Of course, such situation, such synchronization is highly unlikely.

Pffrt

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Technically it's possible that there might be no miners at all but in theory, it's not possible like as TryNinja pointed. If there are no miners to process the tx, with the less network difficulty, it will be easy to mine and some people will jump into it.

bitmover

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As many already mentioned, if miners stop bitcoin will survive.
It is not that easy to kill bitcoin. It will survive

Darker45

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Quote from: TryNinja on April 09, 2020, 11:34:22 PM

Quote from: Darker45 on April 09, 2020, 11:23:53 PM

Miners are there to basically process transactions. If there are no miners, transactions won't be be processed and confirmed. I'm afraid there will be no more transactions on the network without the necessary processing capacity of miners.

This can't happen. If miners leave, the difficulty decreases and becomes easier to mine. People will then start to mine to profit as they get more "space" to do so. And even if BTC ever goes to zero, I'm pretty sure there will be people mining just for the lulz (difficulty will be down anyways, since there is no profit-seek miners, so it won't be expensive).

Of course, this will not happen. I was just responding to a hypothetical question. However, if worst comes to worst and the mining industry will somehow crash, there will be a huge party of individual miners that will ensue. There might be a resurrection of old celeron-powered PCs if the difficulty would reach a very low level. LOL. The past years have virtually erased individual independent miners. Mining farms and multi-million-dollar mining industries are now dominating the market.

pooya87

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first and foremost you can never compare altcoins' behavior with bitcoin. they are always entirely different even if that altcoin uses a similar name. for example BCH and BCHSV are both centralized altcoins the 2 hour delay might have been a plan by the owners who also control almost all the hashrate to decrease the difficulty by kicking any other miner out then making profit by mining all blocks themselves.

secondly it all comes down to incentives. bitcoin price during last halving was about $600 that made the reward go down from $15k per block down to $7500 and miners were still mining bitcoin. now that same $7500 reward per block is worth $91000 and even when it halves it is still worth $45000 which as you can see is 6 times more than when it started!
in comparison with altcoins, like bcash it used to be 0.2 bitcoin and now it is 0.03 as you can see they are always on a downtrend which is why whenever their block reward halves a lot of miners leave since they know the price is going to continue to decline.

Btcbeginners

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After the halving, Bitcoin scarcity will increase, hence most likely too long the market. In the case, a few days or months, some parts of the world, miners will not break even due to Bitcoin block reward drop, which will be fixed Bitcoin when difficulty adjustment. Until this, there may little price drop.

Apocollapse

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Quote from: kakonhat on April 09, 2020, 11:09:20 PM

I am very curious. What will happen for Bitcoin if all the miners stop their mining?

I hope you got the answer in these link

TryNinja

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Quote from: Darker45 on April 09, 2020, 11:23:53 PM

Miners are there to basically process transactions. If there are no miners, transactions won't be be processed and confirmed. I'm afraid there will be no more transactions on the network without the necessary processing capacity of miners.

This can't happen. If miners leave, the difficulty decreases and becomes easier to mine. People will then start to mine to profit as they get more "space" to do so. And even if BTC ever goes to zero, I'm pretty sure there will be people mining just for the lulz (difficulty will be down anyways, since there is no profit-seek miners, so it won't be expensive).

Darker45

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Miners are there to basically process transactions. If there are no miners, transactions won't be be processed and confirmed. I'm afraid there will be no more transactions on the network without the necessary processing capacity of miners.

Value? It depends. If people will still attach value to Bitcoin even if it is not anymore functioning as a currency, or perhaps while waiting for the resumption of mining, then there will still be value.

Transfer on-chain is not possible, of course. But there are off-chain transfers, which I guess will also become more or less useless if the network is not at all functioning and secured.

UserU

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Quote from: kakonhat on April 09, 2020, 11:09:20 PM

We know a few days ago there are completed halving of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. After halving of Bitcoin Cash there was no block created almost two hours. On the other hand, Bitcoin SV lost value after the halving.
I am very curious. What will happen for Bitcoin if all the miners stop their mining?
Will it have value?
will it possible to transfer?

Nobody knows what's gonna happen, but I assume the price might skyrocket because the supply way is less(er) than it's stipulated 21 million (excluding those missing in oblivion). But then again, if they cannot be transferred, the price might go the other way because they have become practically "useless".

kakonhat

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Crypto in my Blood

We know a few days ago there are completed halving of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. After halving of Bitcoin Cash there was no block created almost two hours. On the other hand, Bitcoin SV lost value after the halving.
I am very curious. What will happen for Bitcoin if all the miners stop their mining?
Will it have value?
will it possible to transfer?

Topic: What will happen if all miners stop mining? (Read 360 times)